[ih] what is hypertext, was "The Internet runs on Proposed Standards"

[John R. Levine]

On Sun, 4 Dec 2022, Toerless Eckert wrote:

> To paraphrase like one of my ex-colleagues would have said:
> Did Ted produce any www.showmethemoney.com for his ideas ?

He got modest funding for some attempts at implementation but he is, ah, not 
the best manager of technical projects.

> I always felt in the 90th we needed librarians to bring order to the
> mess which the web became. And i did not believe that crawling and search
> could keep up. But after google figured out its monetization, i
> think we closed the books on these earlier alternative approaches.

It's all a matter of scale.  You can probably do a curated index of millions of 
pages, but not of billions of pages.

It's not unlike the social media moderation problem.  Anything that works at 
scale isn't good, anything good doesn't work at scale.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for 
Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly